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I

F we are to believe one-tenth of what is reported in the press about the activities of German agents in this country, we must conclude that the German government conceives of our political and social organization as analogous to that of a Balkan or an oriental state. In such inchoate political systems it is not regarded as improper for a political party to accept the financial support of a foreign government. In Greece, for example, there are political forces working for the Central Powers and other political forces working for the Allies. German or Allied agents may go about the country openly and entertain social and pecuniary relations with local politicians of influence, without even compromising the political future of the latter. If Greece were an industrial state, foreign money would openly foster strikes, blow up manufacturing plants and wreck railways, as well as overturn ministries, mobilize or demobilize armies, render solemn treaties null and void. Such activities, we repeat, would seem to be legitimately undertaken in a Balkan state. But is not a foreign government mistaking our temper when it assumes that similar activities will prove fruitful here? A powder-mill or steel works may be put out of business, a strike may be arranged, the supplies required by a munitions plant may be tied up. Be it confessed, our police organization is not adapted for the suppression of this kind of disorder. But eventually we shall get rid of it, most likely at the cost of seriously restricting the free movement and the profitable employment of many innocent sympathizers of Germany. And new munitions plants are likely to spring up, two for each one destroyed. There is a long war still ahead of Germany, and she cannot afford for small momentary gains to exacerbate the anti-German feeling in any neutral country, even the United States.

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HERE is very good reason why a country at war should endeavor to exert influence upon neutrals. It was the right and duty of the German statesmen to attempt to prevent the placing of the industrial and financial resources of the United States at the disposal of the Allies. How much American munitions and Anglo-French loans will count for in the end it is impossible to say, but the Germans are not inclined to minimize their importance. Now there was one influence that might legitimately have been brought to bear upon us: publicity. Few believe that the German cause has been as skilfully presented in this country as that of the Allies. It is doubtful that any enterprise in publicity, however skilfully conducted, could have wholly counteracted the effect of the invasion of Belgium; still, a competent presentation of the German cause, either purely voluntary or openly sub

sidized, might have had the effect of increasing materially the strength of the minority who would prefer that we made no profits out of the war. From another point of view it would have been good policy for the German government to address itself seriously to the question of publicity. It would then have gained a clearer insight into the real cost of such undertakings as the sinking of the Falaba, the Lusitania, the Ancona, or the execution of Miss Edith Cavell. Millions in publicity would be required to counteract the effect upon Americans of any one of those incidents.

THE

HE ill-success which has attended British military operations during the past six months is usually attributed to the muddling of the Cabinet; but it is looking more and more as if the responsibility for the British failure must be fastened on the military rather than the political officials. The political leaders have neither interfered with the management of the war by the military experts, nor imposed upon the generals and the staff officers difficult and impossible tasks merely for political purposes. The truth seems to be that the government has been badly served by the heads of its army. There has been no adequate staff organization either for the army as a whole or for its separate units. The major operations have not been planned by men who were competent to anticipate the full difficulties of such a job as the attack on Constantinople, and who were capable of organizing success. On several occasions the British seem to have been on the verge of a decisive victory only to fail because of defective preparation. All accounts agree that at Suvla Bay the carrying out of the attack by the staff of the field commander was fatally inept, in that the troops were left in an arid district without a sufficient supply of water. From the Chief of the War Office down to the brigade commanders there has been a lack of technical knowledge and ability-a lack so widely distributed that the responsibility cannot be fastened on individuals, but must be attributed to the system. The British have always had too much confidence in the well-intentioned, well-born and well-dressed amateur. Their army has been officered by men whose qualifications were more often social than technical, and its failures prove that in modern war courage, tenacity, and sheer fighting ability are no sufficient substitute for knowledge, concentration and brains.

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is equally necessary that men should be trained who are capable of acting as leaders for the communities of negroes in the South. The most prominent institution devoted primarily to this work is Fisk University. Fisk has gradually grown from very small beginnings until it is fairly well equipped for its work. The practical nature of that work is indicated by the fact that of its graduates sixty-four per cent become teachers and twenty-four per cent professional and business men. It has recently inaugurated a new president, Dr. Fayette Avery McKenzie; and its friends confidently hope that under its new and energetic director it will grow still more rapidly and will be able the better to meet the grave responsibility of supplying intellectual leadership for so many million people. Its great necessity is a larger plant and a larger income. Its graduates obtain employment (without difficulty) in the work of teaching or giving professional advice to their fellow negroes, and if there were twice as many of them, the supply would remain inadequate to the demand.

A

T regular intervals some heavy-headed citizen makes moan over the discovery that public libraries are circulating fiction. A recent bulletin from the New York Public Library recalls that this grievance is antique. It quotes an old-time custodian of the Astor Library who complained that his generation was busy consuming "the trashy, as Scott, Cooper, Dickens." This asceticism of the bookworm is scouted by the present spokesman of the New York Public Library. Of all books, he contends, "novels are among the last which a public library should relinquish." This is the wise view. If it is proper for the taxpayers to pay for tulips and kangaroos and elephants, to keep up municipal playgrounds and recreation piers, it is equally proper for them to provide imaginative literature. A library ought not to be a strict parallel to the activities in street-cleaning, water and light. And there is something even to be said for a popular standard in novels for circulation. A classic is usually a bare book in the eyes of the uninitiated. Most people who go on to the classics began by being tempted by the gaudier flies.

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T cannot be repeated too often that the essence of preparedness is a definition of foreign policy. Unless a government knows what it is going to defend, it cannot be said to have a program of Inational defense. How very practical a consideration this is may be seen from the following illustration. The Monroe Doctrine assumes that no European Power is to acquire any more colonies in this hemisphere. It is often suggested that Germany has designs on the southern portion of Brazil. Clearly we cannot know what armament we need

till we have made up our minds whether Germany has such designs, and if she has, whether we should oppose them. Southern Brazil is farther from us than it is from Germany. Do we mean to build a navy capable of defending Brazil? If we do we probably need a different type of ship than if the zone of operations is to be limited, say, to the north Atlantic and the Caribbean. How much may we depend upon the South American republics to safeguard their own territory, and are we taking steps toward a diplomatic and military understanding with them?

THE

HE gravity of the issues involved makes one wonder at times whose official duty it is to think out the grand strategies of American defense. It is not enough to know that the Secretary of the Navy is going to buy half a billion dollars' worth of ships, that the Secretary of War is ready to train and equip a certain number of troops. For any effective use of this armament, the State Department, the army, the navy, the merchant marine, the railroads, the munitions plant, the food supplies, must be coördinated and centralized sufficiently to insure their working together on some plan which has been already thought out. It may be that we shall have to create some kind of council of defense where all the needed services are represented. To let the State Department go its way, the navy its way, the army a different way, means disaster. Ships and guns unless they are instruments of a policy are waste and delusion. Let the advocates of panic preparedness take a lesson from Germany. The best-equipped military power the world has ever seen has failed to win this war. Why? Not because the German army was not superb, but because German diplomacy loaded that army with too great a task.

I

N order to understand the present political situation in the near East and the grave difficulties with which English and French diplomacy have been faced in their attempt to secure Balkan support, one all-important consideration must be kept in mind. When the Triple Entente became an alliance it was inevitable, for good and for evil, that Russia should be the dominant Power in the East. She was bent on acquiring Constantinople, and it is this secular ambition of hers which really has governed the whole movement of Eastern polities since the war broke out. Here was the prime reason why Turkey could not remain neutral, though in the end it required the guns of the Goeben to bring the Young Turks boldly over the line. Here too is the reason why Rumania hesitates, and Bulgaria makes what seems a suicidal sacrifice of her independence. She might have been induced to

break her head against the Tchataldja lines in order to set up a neutral state in Constantinople. She would not do it to install Russia. As things are, she may get her great extension of territory and she may keep it, at the cost of evolving from a democratic peasant state into an empire ridden by militarism. But her independence is gone. She will be henceforward a road in the German strategical system, a satellite tied by treaty and tariff to the Central Powers, as impotent to modify the policy of Prussia as Bavaria is to-day. She has steered into this with her eyes open in order to avoid Russian annexation of Constantinople. She has fled from the familiar danger of the past, with scant appreciation of the far clearer danger of the future. Because she dreaded and had experienced Russian encroachments on her independence she will not pause to reflect what the German encroachments must be. It is a ghastly tragedy, which may prove to be the decisive event of the war, but it is futile to place the blame on Downing Street. The British Foreign Office was fatally hampered by the ambitions of Petrograd.

T

sever relations between the two countries. Andorra
has fewer than six thousand people, but they are a
hardy race and the nation never loses any sure-footed
citizens, the careless ones having long since fallen
into France or Spain. The capital city is larger
than Amos, West Virginia, but it will probably
never catch up with Amana, Iowa. The nation has
no standing army and no troubles of any kind except
a house of representatives. The president gets a
salary of two cheeses, two capons and a ham from
each of the six states; otherwise the people live on
terms of complete equality.

An Alliance with Great Britain
E

LSEWHERE in this issue Mr. George Louis Beer makes an interesting argument in favor of a departure in American foreign policy which to the majority of American citizens will seem obnoxious and dangerous. He proposes an intimate association in international politics between Great Britain and the United States. Whatever weight the proposal has is derived from one major consideration. The American nation any more than the nations of Europe cannot escape its share of a general responsibility for the peace of the world; and the only way in which such a responsibility can be sufficiently redeemed is by participation by the United States in European international councils. Mr. Beer proposes a definite association between this country and the European Power with whom we already have a fair understanding, whose interests coincide on the whole with our own, and whose domestic organization and foreign policy might help to make such association serve the pacification of the world.

HE average American is slow to believe that the foreign policy of the United States is domineering. It is just as well on that account to listen to an unsympathetic outsider. "The United States, by annexing the Philippines and the Sandwich Islands and taking control of Cuba, established herself as an aggressive Power of the first rank. By maintaining the Monroe Doctrine she arrogates to herself in addition the protectorate over the whole of North and South America. Now she is beginning to pose as a sort of dictator-at-large with reference to the rights of the British navy under in- | Many results of the war remain dubious, but if it

ternational law." These are the words of an Englishman, H. M. Hyndman. The only thing the United States seems to lack in his eyes is apparently a spiked helmet and a Kultur. Mr. Hyndman has too many years of bellicosity behind him to have his words weigh heavily, but until we define for ourselves the policy behind our preparedness, we may expect such accusations of arrogance and aggression.

PRE

RESIDENT WILSON recently had a letter from Andorra congratulating him upon his diplomatic victories and expressing a willingness to join in a peace conference. As the White House has a good map, the President was not long in doubt as to the location of his warm admirer. Furthermore, the man who brought the letter gave his word that Andorra was in the Pyrenees when he left. It is the Tom Thumb of all republics, having been inaccessible and independent since the time of Charlemagne. To be sure there is a road leading up from Spain, but avalanches frequently fall upon it and

has demonstrated anything it has demonstrated the mutual dependence between the United States and the Power which controls the seas.

Although the proposal may look revolutionary and dangerous to American public opinion, it is in truth less revolutionary than it looks, and probably not as dangerous as our present ambiguous isolation. The American people have never believed in complete national isolation as an agency of peace. They have recognized an obligation to make their foreign policy contribute if not to the peace of the world, at least to that of the western hemisphere. What else has been the real object of the Monroe Doctrine? Behind the blurred meaning of the phrase has always intruded the remote but clearly recognizable ideal of a group of nations inhabiting the two Americas which would be free from ancient antipathies, from mutual suspicions, from external aggression, and from the exploitation of an autocratic ruling class. The government of the United States has never made any

serious attempt to bring into existence this benevolent American international system, but the vision of it has been unmistakably present; and if ever the Doctrine is really challenged by a European or Asiatic power, it must obviously develop in one of two directions. Either the United States must assume a protectorate over the western hemisphere based upon unquestionable military and naval preponderance, or a Pan-American international system devoted to preserving peace in the western hemisphere must be organized. The isolation which we cherished and which we have been willing to fight for was the isolation of the Americas from Europe, not the isolation of the United States from the world.

What Americans need most to understand is that if they seriously wish to redeem the obligation implicit in the Monroe Doctrine they must extend its scope. If they seriously intend to guard against the invasion of the Americas by European suspicions, antipathies and international aggression, they must themselves carry the fight against these evils into Europe. A secure American international system, no matter how benevolent, cannot remain exclusively American. Its security cannot depend ultimately upon its ability to defend itself against European and Asiatic aggression, because such security would mean an indefinite competition in armaments with foreign Powers. We should merely be organizing insecurity at a tremendous cost, adopting militarism for the sake of protecting ourselves against it. Security in the United States and in America must be primarily a reflection of security in Europe. The whole of America cannot construct a benevolent international organization independent of Europe, any more than one part of it can. The attempted isolation of two continents would be even more disastrously fallacious than the attempted isolation of a single nation.

There should be added the obvious consideration that several European countries already possess dependencies or self-governing dominions in the American hemisphere. These provinces could not be left out of a Pan-American system, but could not be included in it without involving the mother-country. The difficulty is so obvious that American publicists have recently proposed an heroic remedy. They have been insisting that the European nations should be politely but firmly requested to retire from the American continent. It has not been proposed as yet to expel them in case they refuse, but surely their forcible expulsion would be the logical result of an American system whose security depended upon isolation from Europe. As long as they continued to recognize a European allegiance their European political ties would imply obligations incompatible with their geographical Americanism.

Take, for instance, the case of Canada during the present war. Canadian soldiers have been sent to France and Belgium in order to kill Germans. Germany would consequently have every military justification in attacking Canada if only her army could land on Canadian soil. Yet if she did attack Canada, American security in so far as it depended on isolation would be fatally compromised, and the army of the United States, whatever it amounted to, would have to be sent to Canadian assistance. Canadians are allowed to kill Germans in Europe, but the Germans cannot be allowed to carry the war into their enemy's countries. This is merely a flagrant instance of the difficulties and absurdities which result from the attempt to secure peace in America without any reference to the forces which are making both for peace and war in Europe.

Any secure Pan-American system must rest upon effective sympathy and support in Europe. If the United States really wishes to secure the Americas against European aggression it must arrange an understanding with the European Power whose assistance would be most serviceable. That Power is plainly the mistress of the seas. An arrangement with Germany, even if in other respects possible or desirable, would involve the enmity of Great Britain and the necessity of building a navy large enough to contest with her the control of the seas. An arrangement with Great Britain would enable the United States to keep its armament within moderate limits, while at the same time providing the utmost possible security for its Pan-American system. In point of fact the Monroe Doctrine has almost from the beginning depended on British good-will, and no matter what form it assumes in the future, it cannot escape such dependence. It cannot be protected against the dominant sea power except by challenging British maritime supremacy. It cannot effectively be contested except with the consent of the British commonwealth. Thus an alliance with Great Britain would merely formally recognize a situation which has existed for some time and has been emphasized by the circumstances of the war. It would constitute in effect an offer of the support of American resources to Great Britain at a time when British resources were depleted, and in return for a larger measure of national security and a persuasive promise of future international pacification.

The NEW REPUBLIC does not endorse a British alliance as an immediately practicable measure of American foreign policy. Even if public opinion were disposed to reach an agreement with England instead of being reluctant or indifferent, the obstacles to be surmounted before a definite treaty could be contrived would be numerous and stubborn. The United States could not enter into an alliance with Great Britain in case Great Britain and her existing Allies at the end of the war continued in combination expressly for the purpose of securing the fruits of a victory over Germany. It could not enter into an alliance with Great Britain until its existing controversy with that country in respect to the control of maritime commerce during war had been adjusted, and a charter of commercial rights satisfactory in some measure to pacific trading nations framed, signed and sealed. Finally, a definition of the scope of the arrangement and the limitation of the liabilities incurred by both parties under it, would involve at the present time enormous and perhaps insuperable difficulties.

But if a formal alliance is not possible in the near future, an increasing measure of mutual understanding is. Such an understanding can gradually be reached provided an enlightened public opinion in the United States seeks to bring it about, and as a means of bringing it about deliberately plans to adjust existing conflicts of policy, to establish routes of agreement, and to clear up the ambiguities of the existing relationship. The initiative should be taken by the agencies of American opinion, not because we would gain more from an understanding than Great Britain would, but because the obstacles to an understanding in this country are more serious than the obstacles in Great Britain. The greatest obstacle is the American tradition of national isolation-the sense that by committing ourselves to European responsibilities we should be surrendering something essential and noble in our heritage of democracy. This tradition is the enemy which must be exposed and exterminated, for unless it is exterminated we shall have misinterpreted the chief lesson of the war and permitted the nation to continue a policy of suicidal exclusiveness. As yet we seem to have learned nothing. The disheartening aspect of the current agitation for military preparedness is that it is animated not by a clear conviction of the international obligations and opportunities of the country, but by a kind of blind suspicion and panic. The proclaimed object of the armament is to defend our national isolation, not to realize a positive policy which will enable us to promote both our own security and the peace of the world. There can be no permanent security unless the pacific nations are welded into an organization sufficiently tough, alert, clear-headed and wellequipped to make their joint power count decisively in the balance against an aggressive disturber of the peace. An increasing understanding between Great Britain and the United States would constitute a necessary condition of any League of Peace, and if it could develop into an alliance it might become by virtue of unassailable maritime supremacy the substance and chief support of such a League.

IF

"Plumb Insane"

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Freports are true, Mr. Thomas Shevlin has made a memorable utterance: Against Princeton you must all go insane, plumb insane-but keep your heads." The result is known to all the world, and how all the world feels about it can be seen from an account written for the New York Evening Post:"...through utter willingness to give the final measure of physical sacrifice, those men of Yale lifted from the muck a bedraggled, bedaubed blue banner, holding it on high so that it floated and snapped proudly once more, glorified by the light of victory." Treitschke would hardly have done better than this: "If there was a Yale graduate who did not feel the impulse to stand in his place and uncover silently...

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Harvard They can

That it is a splendid thing to go insane, to keep your head, and to uncover silently is not to be denied. The glory of football is that it permits such things. A struggle in which a man can be an absolute partisan is a comfort indeed. No Yale man need question that Yale ought to win. men and Princeton men can be as certain. be loyal without a quaver of conscience, they can desire victory without thinking of consequences. Wherever they happen to belong, there they can put their faith. And even those hyphenates who go from Yale to the Harvard Law School may be for Yale and no questions asked.

If only life were like football, what a splendid education young America would be receiving. It would be learning that loyalty is greater than discrimination, that the crowd you are in is the best crowd of all. A Yale freshman who wanted to see Harvard win because Harvard contributes to human culture would be an ass. He would be treated by his classmates as Englishmen are now treated who admire German professors. For the point you are trained to in intercollegiate athletics is that there are only two sides to a question, and that the side you are against has nothing to recommend it.

There have been highbrow eulogies of football. It is, we are told, a harmless outlet for pugnacity; it introduces a dionysian element into our drab lives; it purges through pity and fear; it is to America what the Saturnalia was to the ancients. Perhaps. Yet one difference must be noted. The Greeks never supposed that the passions they put into their festivals were the passions that ought to dominate human life. In the spiritual democracy which they preached they gave representations to all the elements of man. With us this is not the We like to regard college spirit as a model. We expect a man to feel towards his country, his city, his corporation, his political party, about as

case.

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